The term "state capitalism" is also used by some in reference to a private capitalist economy controlled by a state, often meaning a privately owned economy that is subject to statist economic planning. This term was often used to describe the controlled economies of the Great Powers in the First World War.[10] State capitalism has also come to refer to an economic system where the means of production are owned privately, but the state has considerable control over the allocation of credit and investment[11][12] as in the case of France during the period of dirigisme after the Second World War. State capitalism may be used (sometimes interchangeably with state monopoly capitalism) to describe a system where the state intervenes in the economy to protect and advance the interests of large-scale businesses.

There are various theories and critiques of state capitalism, some of which existed before the 1917 October Revolution. The common themes among them identify that the workers do not meaningfully control the means of production and detect that commodity relations and production for profit still occur within state capitalism. In Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880), Friedrich Engels argued that state ownership does not do away with capitalism by itself, but rather would be the final stage of capitalism, consisting of ownership and management of large-scale production and communication by the bourgeois state. He argued that the tools for ending capitalism are found in state capitalism.[17]

It has been suggested that the concept of state capitalism can be traced back to Mikhail Bakunin's critique during the First International of the potential for state exploitation under Marxist-inspired socialism, or to Jan Waclav Machajski's argument in The Intellectual Worker (1905) that socialism was a movement of the intelligentsia as a class, resulting in a new type of society he termed state capitalism.[19][20][21][22] For anarchists, state socialism is equivalent to state capitalism, hence oppressive and merely a shift from private capitalists to the state being the sole employer and capitalist.[23]

During World War I, using Vladimir Lenin's idea that Czarism was taking a "Prussian path" to capitalism, the BolshevikNikolai Bukharin identified a new stage in the development of capitalism in which all sectors of national production and all important social institutions had become managed by the state—he termed this new stage "state capitalism".[24]

After the October Revolution, Lenin used the term positively. In spring 1918, during a brief period of economic liberalism prior to the introduction of war communism and again during the New Economic Policy (NEP) of 1921, Lenin justified the introduction of state capitalism controlled politically by the dictatorship of the proletariat to further central control and develop the productive forces:

Reality tells us that state capitalism would be a step forward. If in a small space of time we could achieve state capitalism, that would be a victory.[25][26]

Lenin argued the state should temporarily run the economy, which would eventually be taken over by workers.[27] To Lenin, "state capitalism" did not mean the state would run most of the economy, but that "state capitalism" would be one of five elements of the economy:[28]

State capitalism would be a step forward as compared with the present state of affairs in our Soviet Republic. If in approximately six months' time state capitalism became established in our Republic, this would be a great success and a sure guarantee that within a year socialism will have gained a permanently firm hold.[28]

Perhaps the earliest critique of the Soviet Union as state capitalist was formulated by the Russian anarchists as documented in Paul Avrich's work on Russian anarchism.[29]

This claim would become standard in anarchist works. For example, the prominent anarchist Emma Goldman in an article from 1935 titled "There Is No Communism in Russia" said of the Soviet Union:

Such a condition of affairs may be called state capitalism, but it would be fantastic to consider it in any sense Communistic [...] Soviet Russia, it must now be obvious, is an absolute despotism politically and the crassest form of state capitalism economically.[30]

Marxism, in fact, becomes ideology. It is assimilated by the most advanced forms of state capitalist movement—notably Russia. By an incredible irony of history, Marxian 'socialism' turns out to be in large part the very state capitalism that Marx failed to anticipate in the dialectic of capitalism. The proletariat, instead of developing into a revolutionary class within the womb of capitalism, turns out to be an organ within the body of bourgeois society [...] Lenin sensed this and described 'socialism' as 'nothing but state capitalist monopoly made to benefit the whole people'. This is an extraordinary statement if one thinks out its implications, and a mouthful of contradictions.[31]

Rather than present an effective and efficient means of achieving revolution, the Leninist model is elitist, hierarchical and highly inefficient in achieving a socialist society. At best, these parties play a harmful role in the class struggle by alienating activists and militants with their organisational principles and manipulative tactics within popular structures and groups. At worse, these parties can seize power and create a new form of class society (a state capitalist one) in which the working class is oppressed by new bosses (namely, the party hierarchy and its appointees).[32]

Another early analysis of the Soviet Union as state capitalist came from various groups advocating left communism. One major tendency of the 1918 Russian communist left criticised the re-employment of authoritarian capitalist relations and methods of production. As Valerian Osinsky in particular argued, "one-man management" (rather than the democratic factory committees workers had established and Lenin abolished)[33] and the other impositions of capitalist discipline would stifle the active participation of workers in the organisation of production—Taylorism converted workers into the appendages of machines and piece work imposed individualist rather than collective rewards in production so instilling petty bourgeois values into workers. In sum, these measures were seen as the re-transformation of proletarians within production from collective subject back into the atomised objects of capital. The working class, it was argued, had to participate consciously in economic as well as political administration. This tendency within the 1918 left communists emphasized that the problem with capitalist production was that it treated workers as objects. Its transcendence lay in the workers' conscious creativity and participation, which is reminiscent of Marx's critique of alienation.[34]

Immediately after the Russian Revolution, many Western Marxists questioned whether socialism was possible in Russia. Specifically, Karl Kautsky said:

It is only the old feudal large landed property which exists no longer. Conditions in Russia were ripe for its abolition but they were not ripe for the abolition of capitalism. Capitalism is now once again celebrating a resurrection, but in forms that are more oppressive and harrowing for the proletariat than of old. Instead of assuming higher industrialised forms, private capitalism has assumed the most wretched and shabby forms of black marketeering and money speculation. Industrial capitalism has developed to become state capitalism. Formerly state officials and officials from private capital were critical, often very hostile towards each other. Consequently the working man found that his advantage lay with one or the other in turn. Today the state bureaucracy and capitalist bureaucracy are merged into one—that is the upshot of the great socialist revolution brought about by the Bolsheviks. It constitutes the most oppressive of all despotisms that Russia has ever had to suffer.[37]

After 1929, exiled Mensheviks such as Fyodor Dan began to argue that Stalin's Russia constituted a state capitalist society.[38] In the United Kingdom, the orthodox Marxist group the Socialist Party of Great Britain independently developed a similar doctrine. Although initially beginning with the idea that Soviet capitalism differed little from western capitalism, they later began to argue that the bureaucracy held its productive property in common, much like the Catholic Church's.[39] As John O'Neill notes:

Whatever other merits or problems their theories had, in arguing that the Russian revolution was from the outset a capitalist revolution they avoided the ad hoc and post hoc nature of more recent Maoist- and Trotskyist-inspired accounts of state capitalism, which start from the assumption that the Bolshevik revolution inaugurated a socialist economy that at some later stage degenerated into capitalism.[40]

Rudolf Hilferding, writing in the Menshevik journal Socialist Courier April 25, 1940 rejected the concept of state capitalism, noting that, as practiced in the Soviet Union, it lacked the dynamic aspects of capitalism such as a market which set prices or a set of entrepreneurs and investors which allocated capital. Thus, state capitalism was not a form of capitalism but a form of totalitarianism.[41]

Leon Trotsky said the term state capitalism "originally arose to designate the phenomena which arise when a bourgeois state takes direct charge of the means of transport or of industrial enterprises" and is therefore a "partial negation" of capitalism.[42] However, Trotsky rejected that description of the Soviet Union, claiming instead that it was a degenerated workers' state. After World War II, most Trotskyists accepted an analysis of the Soviet bloc countries as being deformed workers' states. However, alternative opinions of the Trotskyist tradition have developed the theory of state capitalism as a New Class theory to explain what they regard as the essentially non-socialist nature of the Soviet Union, Cuba, China and other self-proclaimed socialist states.

After 1940, dissident Trotskyists developed more theoretically sophisticated accounts of state capitalism. One influential formulation has been that of the Johnson–Forest Tendency of C. L. R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya who formulated her theory in the early 1940s on the basis of a study of the first three Five Year Plans alongside readings of Marx's early humanist writings. Their political evolution would lead them away from Trotskyism.[45] Another is that of Tony Cliff, associated with the International Socialist Tendency and the British Socialist Workers Party (SWP), dating back to the late 1940s. Unlike Johnson-Forest, Cliff formulated a theory of state capitalism that would enable his group to remain Trotskyists, albeit heterodox ones.[46] A relatively recent text by Stephen Resnick and Richard D. Wolff, Class Theory and History, explores what they term state capitalism in the former Soviet Union, continuing a theme that has been debated within Trotskyist theory for most of the past century.

From 1956 to the late 1970s, the Communist Party of China and their Maoist or anti-revisionist adherents around the world often described the Soviet Union as state capitalist, essentially using the accepted Marxist definition, albeit on a different basis and in reference to a different span of time from either the Trotskyists or the left-communists. Specifically, the Maoists and their descendants use the term state capitalism as part of their description of the style and politics of Nikita Khrushchev and his successors as well as to similar leaders and policies in other self-styled "socialist" states.[47] This was involved in the ideological Sino-Soviet Split.

Most current communist groups descended from the Maoist ideological tradition still adopt the description of both China and the Soviet Union as being "state capitalist" from a certain point in their history onwards—most commonly, the Soviet Union from 1956 to its collapse in 1991 and China from 1976 to the present. Maoists and "anti-revisionists" also sometimes use the term "social imperialism" to describe socialist states that they consider to be actually capitalist in essence—their phrase, "socialist in words, imperialist in deeds" denotes this.

Murray Rothbard, an anarcho-capitalist philosopher, uses the term interchangeably with the term state monopoly capitalism and uses it to describe a partnership of government and big business in which the state intervenes on behalf of large capitalists against the interests of consumers.[49][50] He distinguishes this from laissez-fairecapitalism where big business is not protected from market forces. This usage dates from the 1960s, when Harry Elmer Barnes described the post-New Deal economy of the United States as "state capitalism". More recently, Andrei Illarionov, former economic advisor to Russian President Vladimir Putin, resigned in December 2005, protesting Russia's "embracement of state capitalism".[51]

However, the term is not used by classical liberals to describe the public ownership of the means of production. The explanation why is given by the Austrian School economist Ludwig von Mises who states that: "The socialist movement takes great pains to circulate frequently new labels for its ideally constructed state. Each worn-out label is replaced by another which raises hopes of an ultimate solution of the insoluble basic problem of Socialism—until it becomes obvious that nothing has been changed but the name. The most recent slogan is "State Capitalism." It is not commonly realized that this covers nothing more than what used to be called Planned Economy and State Socialism, and that State Capitalism, Planned Economy, and State Socialism diverge only in non-essentials from the "classic" ideal of egalitarian Socialism".[52]

On economic issues, Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini claimed in 1933 that were Fascism to follow the modern phase of capitalism, its path would "lead inexorably into state capitalism, which is nothing more nor less than state socialism turned on its head. In either event, [whether the outcome be state capitalism or state socialism] the result is the bureaucratization of the economic activities of the nation".[53] Mussolini claimed that capitalism had degenerated in three stages, starting with dynamic or heroic capitalism (1830–1870), followed by static capitalism (1870–1914) and then reaching its final form of decadent capitalism, also known as supercapitalism beginning in 1914.[54]

Mussolini denounced supercapitalism for causing the "standardization of humankind" and for causing excessive consumption.[55] Mussolini claimed that at this stage of supercapitalism "[it] is then that a capitalist enterprise, when difficulties arise, throws itself like a dead weight into the state's arms. It is then that state intervention begins and becomes more necessary. It is then that those who once ignored the state now seek it out anxiously".[56] Due to the inability of businesses to operate properly when facing economic difficulties, Mussolini claimed that this proved that state intervention into the economy was necessary to stabilize the economy.[56]

Mussolini claimed that dynamic or heroic capitalism and the bourgeoisie could be prevented from degenerating into static capitalism and then supercapitalism only if the concept of economic individualism were abandoned and if state supervision of the economy was introduced.[57]Private enterprise would control production, but it would be supervised by the state.[58] Italian Fascism presented the economic system of corporatism as the solution that would preserve private enterprise and property while allowing the state to intervene in the economy when private enterprise failed.[57]

An alternate definition is that state capitalism is a close relationship between the government and private capitalism, such as one in which the private capitalists produce for a guaranteed market. An example of this would be the military–industrial complex in which autonomous entrepreneurial firms produce for lucrative government contracts and are not subject to the discipline of competitive markets.

Both the Trotskyist definition and this one derive from discussion among Marxists at the beginning of the 20th century, most notably Nikolai Bukharin, who in his book Imperialism and the world economy thought that advanced, imperialist countries exhibited the latter definition and considered (and rejected) the possibility that they could arrive at the former.

State capitalism is practised by a variety of Western countries with respect to certain strategic resources important for national security. These may involve private investment as well. For example, a government may own or even monopolize oil production or transport infrastructure to ensure availability in the case of war. Examples include Neste, Equinor and OMV.

There are limits according to arguments that state capitalism exists to ensure that wealth creation does not threaten the ruling elite's political power, which remains unthreatened by tight connections between the government and the industries while state capitalist fears of capitalism's "creative destruction", of the threat of revolution and of any significant changes in the system result in the persistence of industries that have outlived their economic usefulness and an inefficient economic environment that is ill equipped to inspire innovation.

Several European scholars and political economists have used the term to describe one of the three major varieties of capitalism that prevail in the modern context of the European Union. This approach is mainly influenced by Schmidt's (2002) article on The Futures of European Capitalism, in which she divides modern European capitalism in three groups: "Market", "Managed" and "State". Here, state capitalism refers to a system where high coordination between the state, large companies and labour unions ensures economic growth and development in a quasi-corporatist model. The author cites France and to a lesser extent Italy as the prime examples of modern European state capitalism.[59] A general theory of capitalist forms, whereby state capitalism is a particular case, was developed by Ernesto Screpanti, who argued that soviet type economies of the 20th century used state capitalism to sustain processes of primitive accumulation.[60] In their historical analysis of the Soviet Union, Marxist economists Richard D. Wolff and Stephen Resnick identify state capitalism as the dominant class system throughout the history of the Soviet Union.[61]

The theory of state monopoly capitalism was initially a neo-Stalinist doctrine popularised after World War II. Lenin had claimed in 1916 that World War I had transformed laissez-faire capitalism into monopoly capitalism, but he did not publish any extensive theory about the topic. The term refers to an environment where the state intervenes in the economy to protect large monopolistic or oligopolistic businesses from competition by smaller firms.[62] The main principle of the ideology is that big business, having achieved a monopoly or cartel position in most markets of importance, fuses with the government apparatus. A kind of financial oligarchy or conglomerate therefore results, whereby government officials aim to provide the social and legal framework within which giant corporations can operate most effectively. This is a close partnership between big business and government and it is argued that the aim is to integrate labour-unions completely in that partnership.

State monopoly capitalist (stamocap) theory aims to define the final historical stage of capitalism following monopoly capitalism, consistent with Lenin's definition of the characteristics of imperialism in his short pamphlet of the same name. Occasionally the stamocap concept also appears in neo-Trotskyist theories of state capitalism as well as in libertarian anti-state theories. The analysis made is usually identical in its main features, but very different political conclusions are drawn from it.

Ever since monopoly capital took over the world, it has kept the greater part of humanity in poverty, dividing all the profits among the group of the most powerful countries. The standard of living in those countries is based on the extreme poverty of our countries.

The strategic political implication of stamocap theory towards the end of the Joseph Stalin era and afterwards was that the labour movement should form a "people's democratic alliance" under the leadership of the Communist Party with the progressive middle classes and small business against the state and big business (called "monopoly" for short). Sometimes this alliance was also called the "anti-monopoly alliance".

The state in Soviet-type societies was redefined by the neo-Trotskyists as being also state-monopoly capitalist. There was no difference between the West and the East in this regard. Consequently, some kind of anti-bureaucratic revolution was said to be required, but different Trotskyist groups quarreled about what form such a revolution would need to take, or could take.

Some Trotskyists believed the anti-bureaucratic revolution would happen spontaneously, inevitably and naturally, others believed it needed to be organised—the aim being to establish a society owned and operated by the working class. According to the neo-Trotskyists, the Communist Party could not play its leading role because it did not represent the interests of the working class.

When Varga introduced the theory, orthodox Stalinist economists attacked it as incompatible with the doctrine that state planning was a feature only of socialism and that "under capitalism anarchy of production reigns".[64]

Stamocap theory wrongly implied that the state could somehow overrule inter-capitalist competition, the laws of motion of capitalism and market forces generally, supposedly cancelling out the operation of the law of value.

Stamocap theory lacked any sophisticated account of the class basis of the state and the real linkages between governments and elites. It postulated a monolithic structure of domination which in reality did not exist in that way.

Stamocap theory failed to explain the rise of neo-liberal ideology in the business class, which claims precisely that an important social goal should be a reduction of the state's influence in the economy.

Stamocap theory failed to show clearly what the difference was between a socialist state and a bourgeois state, except that in a socialist state the Communist Party (or, rather, its central committee) played the leading political role. In that case, the class-content of the state itself was defined purely in terms of the policy of the ruling political party (or its central committee).

WALL-E has the "Buy n' Large" corporation, which acted as the de facto and possibly de jure government in the decades before, and after, the evacuation of Earth.

The Druuge, an alien race in Star Control, are governed by the Crimson Corporation, which owns the Druuge home planet and everything on it. All Druuge are employees and/or shareholders of this corporation and Druuge who lose their jobs are immediately executed for stealing the planet's air, which the company owns, by breathing it.

State capitalism is distinguished from capitalist mixed economies where the state intervenes in markets to correct market failures or to establish social regulation or social welfare provisions in the following way: the state operates businesses for the purpose of accumulating capital and directing investment in the framework of either a free market or a mixed-market economy. In such a system, governmental functions and public services are often organized as corporations, companies or business enterprises.

In this system, governments use various kinds of state-owned companies to manage the exploitation of resources that they consider the state's crown jewels and to create and maintain large numbers of jobs. They use select privately owned companies to dominate certain economic sectors. They use so-called sovereign wealth funds to invest their extra cash in ways that maximize the state's profits. In all three cases, the state is using markets to create wealth that can be directed as political officials see fit. And in all three cases, the ultimate motive is not economic (maximizing growth) but political (maximizing the state's power and the leadership's chances of survival). This is a form of capitalism but one in which the state acts as the dominant economic player and uses markets primarily for political gain.

Following on Bremmer, Aligica and Tarko[70] further develop the theory that state capitalism in countries like modern day China and Russia is an example of a rent-seeking society. They argue that following the realization that the centrally planned socialist systems could not effectively compete with capitalist economies, formerly Communist Party political elites are trying to engineer a limited form of economic liberalization that increases efficiency while still allowing them to maintain political control and power.

In his article "We're All State Capitalists Now", British historian and Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard UniversityNiall Ferguson warns against "an unhelpful oversimplification to divide the world into 'market capitalist' and 'state capitalist' camps. The reality is that most countries are arranged along a spectrum where both the intent and the extent of state intervention in the economy vary".[69] He then notes:[69]

The real contest of our time is not between a state-capitalist China and a market-capitalist America, with Europe somewhere in the middle. It is a contest that goes on within all three regions as we all struggle to strike the right balance between the economic institutions that generate wealth and the political institutions that regulate and redistribute it.

Whenever necessary and possible, private capital shall be encouraged to develop in the direction of state capitalism.

Analysis of the "Chinese model" by the economists Julan Du and Chenggang Xu finds that the contemporary economic system of the People's Republic of China represents a state capitalist system as opposed to a market socialist system. The reason for this categorization is the existence of financial markets in the Chinese economic system, which are absent in the market socialist literature and in the classic models of market socialism; and that state profits are retained by enterprises rather than being equitably distributed among the population in a basic income/social dividend or similar scheme, which are major features in the market socialist literature. They conclude that China is neither a form of market socialism nor a stable form of capitalism.[72]

Taiwan's economy has been classified as a state capitalist system influenced by its Leninist model of political control, a legacy which still lingers in the decision-making process. Taiwan's economy includes a number of state-owned enterprises, but the Taiwanese state's role in the economy shifted from that of an entrepreneur to a minority investor in companies alongside the democratization agenda of the late 1980s.[73]

The government of Norway has ownership stakes in many of the country's largest publicly listed companies, owning 37% of the Oslo stockmarket[74] and operates the country's largest non-listed companies including Statoil and Statkraft. The government also operates a sovereign wealth fund, the Government Pension Fund of Norway, whose partial objective is to prepare Norway for a post-oil future.[74]

Singapore's government owns controlling shares in many government-linked companies and directs investment through sovereign wealth funds, an arrangement commonly cited as state capitalism.[75] Singapore has attracted some of the world's most powerful corporations through business friendly legislation and through the encouragement of Western style corporatism, with close cooperation between the state and corporations. Singapore's large holdings of government-linked companies and the state's close cooperation with business are defining aspects of Singapore's economic model.

^
Compare:
Williams, Raymond (1985) [1976]. "Capitalism". Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Oxford paperbacks (revised ed.). New York: Oxford University Press. p. 52. ISBN9780195204698. Retrieved April 30, 2017. A new phrase, state-capitalism, has been widely used in mC20, with precedents from eC20, to describe forms of state ownership in which the original conditions of the definition - centralized ownership of the means of production, leading to a system of wage-labour - have not really changed.

^Allan G. Johnson. The Blackwell Dictionary of Sociology. (2000). Blackwell Publishing. ISBN0-631-21681-2. p. 306. In 2008, the U.S. National Intelligence Council used the term in Global Trends 2025: A World Transformed to describe the development of Russia, India and China.

^For Bakunin: Gouldner, A.W. 1982. 'Marx's last battle: Bakunin and the First International', Theory and Society 11(6), November, pp. 853-84. Gouldner argues that Bakunin formulated an original critique of Marxism as 'the ideology, not of the working class, but of a new class of scientific intelligentsia—who would corrupt socialism, make themselves a new elite, and impose their rule on the majority' (pp. 860-1)

^Dittmer, Lowell (2017). Taiwan and China: Fitful Embrace. University of California Press. p. 118. ISBN978-0520295988. A decade after Taiwan made its democratic transition, the KMT’s Leninist control model has yet to fade from the decision-making process. In short, both China’s and Taiwan’s state capitalism have their roots in the Leninist legacy...To be specific, Taiwan’s state capitalism has experienced a transformation from ‘leviathan as entrepreneur’ in the pre-1989 period to ‘leviathan as a minority investor’ with the agenda of democratization in the late 1980s.

G. N. Sorvina et al., "The Role of the State in the System of State Monopoly Capitalism", in: The Teaching of Political Economy: A Critique of Non Marxian Theories. Moscow: Progress, 1984, pages 171-179.